An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org

Life's catastrophe: An angry editorial

From Ian Whyte, The Ecological Citizen
April 2024

"There is no right way to do a wrong thing."
~ An old saying used by Doug Tompkins

Common eastern bumblebee

The human enterprise is eradicating non-human life on Earth. The WWF's Living Planet Report 2016 reveals that, worldwide, wildlife populations declined by 58% between 1970 (itself too late for a proper base year) and 2012, with the expectation that this decline will reach 67% by 2020 (WWF, 2016).

In Canada, my home, the situation is similar: half of 903 species monitored saw population declines over the same period, and the average for half of these was a population loss of 83% (WWF-Canada, 2017).

Recent reports from Germany detail how the insect population there is crashing with a decline of 76% of total flying insect biomass in protected nature reserves since 1990, and an even higher decline (over 80%) in the summer months (Hallman et al., 2017).

As I write this, reports show that bird populations in the French countryside have declined there by more than a third in just the past 17 years—a situation described by conservation biologists as "catastrophic" (Geffroy, 20189).

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE, including:

• Bumblebee rage
• The weight of evidence piles up
• Consideration and conclusions

Yellow-rumped warbler

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